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From:   Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
To:     Max Mehl <max.mehl@fsfe.org>, LKML <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>
Cc:     Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>,
        Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>, linux-spdx@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: [patch 0/9] scripts/spdxcheck: Better statistics and exclude
 handling
In-Reply-To: <87zgjhpawr.ffs@tglx>
References: <20220516101901.475557433@linutronix.de>
 <1652706350.kh41opdwg4.2220@fsfe.org> <87zgjhpawr.ffs@tglx>
Date:   Mon, 16 May 2022 20:59:16 +0200
Message-ID: <87wnelpam3.ffs@tglx>
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On Mon, May 16 2022 at 20:52, Thomas Gleixner wrote:

> On Mon, May 16 2022 at 15:14, Max Mehl wrote:
>> Thank you for picking up the effort to add license (and perhaps also
>> copyright) info to all files in the Kernel.
>
> Adding copyright notices retroactively is not going to happen
> ever. That's just impossible.
>
>>> The exclude of files and directories is hardcoded in the script which makes
>>> it hard to maintain and the information cannot be accessed by external tools.
>>
>> Unfortunately, excluding files (i.e. not adding machine-readable
>> license/copyright information to it) would also block reaching full
>> compliance with the REUSE best practices. Have you considered making
>> them available under GPL-2.0-only or a license similar to public domain
>> [^2]?
>
> The LICENSE directory is already handled by spdxcheck as the license
> information is read from there. And no, we cannot add a GPL-2.0-only
> identifier to all of the files under the LICENSE directory for obvious
> reasons.
>
> license-rules.rst is not longer a problem as all incarnations have a
> proper SPDX identifier today.

There is also an argument to be made whether we really need to have SPDX
identifiers on trivial files:

#include <someheader.h>
<EOF>

Such files are not copyrightable by any means. So what's the value of
doubling the line count to add an SPDX identifier? Just to make nice
statistics?

Thanks,

        tglx